Fritz, Great gramma's b-day, family portrait

June

I watched Sydney a few times so that Carrie could pack for their move. I took her and Jamie down to Fritz one afternoon (notice how Sydney has ALL the sauces).

Great grandma turns 92 (my grandma). She has very bad dementia so it is always a little entertaining (and a bit sad). But she does love to see the kids and thankfully she still remembers who they are! The best part? The kids love the wheelchair rides!



...and of course they loved cake too!

...but mostly the frosting:

Down by the lake after the party:



Playing with Gramma & Grampa's train:
Here's a family portrait we got done back in May while we were in San Diego. It was supposed to be my mother's day present but it was pretty much a disaster. Both kids were grumpy (at 10:30 in the morning!), but we finally got a decent shot.

a bunch of unedited photos for you

I'm trying to be more consistent with my blogging, and seeing it is almost midnight, I am going to put off editing these photos to another day (since they are like, so 2 months ago anyways). So here you go.

Abby trying out the woolies from G&G neigh-neigh:

Wow, our grass was green at one time:
Jamie insisted he needed a hat one day when it was clearly warm outside (and notice how he wears it like his dad?):
Miss pigtails:
My neighbors flowers (hey, I've been gardening lately!):

I thought this was funny how they were sitting, but of course I couldn't get them both to look at the same time:

Jamie and Chad had a campout in the backyard one night. Jamie was so excited, he helped set it up and then they read a story or two before going to sleep. In the morning, Chad sent Jamie in the house when he woke up (about 7 am) while he (Chad, who else) continued to sleep for another few hours. But Jamie kept talking about his campout for several days after this, and was a bit confused when I told him we were ALL going to sleep in the tent out at Belfair (nevermind we have another tent!).

sand box and other springtime activities

One rainy day Jamie wanted to play in the sandbox so we put a hat on him:


But that did not suffice, so out came the sun umbrella (ironic, huh?):




And another day that Jamie and Abby were playing in the sand box (these pics are from when we first got new sand, needless to say, there is a lot less, at least in the sand box, now):




And some other activities that Jamie enjoyed this spring include: drawing on belly, wearing sister's flare jeans, and riding the bike in the house in pajamas and slippers (he doesn't know that this is a privilege most kids don't get!):




Our pink princess, these were taken before the pain-staking process of getting her eye-teeth in, at which point, she was not so "princessy":

seattle aquarium

Well, I was looking through my pictures and the blog archives and realized that I never blogged about our trip to the seattle aquarium way back in March. Chad had just returned from a trip out to sea working on one of the carriers, so we decided to have a family day in seattle. The aquarium has been newly remodeled and is really nice. Here are some pics:











Over by the pike place market they were filming a movie (I can't remember which one now):

Asleep at the market:

update

So I realized that I've only made one blog post this whole month so I mean to remedy that issue today. I actually haven't done any programming since June 1st so there's really no excuse. No wait, there is, this is what my computer looks like:
That was after falling about 8 ft to it's demise on the hardwood floor. I was bringing it out of the attic (where I had been scanning pages) and the strap on the bag I was using broke (nevermind one strap was already broken and it was a stupid thing to do). Thankfully the inside of the computer still works and that is what I am using now until the new Dell arrives. My brother Jon was on vacation so I "borrowed" one of his flat screens. He got back yesterday and is probably now wondering where the heck it is.
So there's been alot going on in the last 2 months and a ton of pictures taken. The problem is that now that I've figured out how to make almost every picture look better in photoshop, I want to edit them all before I share them! And of course, I just don't have time to edit a few hundred pictures every few days. So I will try to not be so obsessive about it. And speaking of editing pictures, whoever says that jpeg is just as good as raw is wrong. And it's my opinion that it's not a matter of opinion (if that makes sense at all). The SOOC (straight out of the camera) shot is hardly noticable between jpeg and raw, that's true. However, if you find yourself in a low light situation, or some other situation where your exposure is not spot on, well then you can't do much about it if you're shooting in jpeg format. Raw, on the otherhand, has no loss of information from the original picture, and you can easily adjust the exposure in photoshop with no wierd looking, grainy pictures coming out of the deal. Here's an example.
Very dark jpeg picture:

Very bad looking after attempting to edit file (grainy & odd colors):


Very dark raw file (converted to jpeg):

Very good looking edited raw file (converted to jpeg AFTER editing):


Stay tuned for most posts.